The Politics of Cultural Memory ad Culinary Nationalism: Revisiting the Bangladesh Liberation War through Nadeem Zaman’s In the Time of the Others

Abstract

The Partition of the Indian subcontinent has been an area rife with scholarship and with the increasing turn towards memory studies, I propose to revisit the site of the borders from the field of gastronomy. The discursive practices employed in the mapping of memories through fictional landscapes and narratives by Nadeem Zaman, the Bangladeshi-American author will potentially open up the spatial coordinates to interpretation, with the focus on the eastern borders and specifically the Bangladesh Liberation War. The history of the nations will be revisited in an attempt to register the challenges of cultural opposition through the culinary registers. The culinary landscape authored by Nadeem Zaman addresses the gaps in the cultural memory of the nationalist movement at the heart of the Bangladesh Liberation War. In The Time of the Others by Nadeem Zaman would re-write the ideas nationalism, through alternate spaces, highlighting the ‘culinary nationalism’. The paper also proposes to situate the culinary register with the broader discipline of memory studies and claim its space in what Alleida Assmann would call the ‘archive’, though ‘trauma’ studies have dominated the ‘canon’ of cultural memory of the Eastern borders of the Indian subcontinent and the Bangladesh Liberation War.